As Plot Turns, See`s Characters Become Tangled

BOOKS - NOVEL

December 1, 1991|By ANNE WHITEHOUSE, Special to the Sun-Sentinel

MAKING HISTORY. By Carolyn See. Houghton Mifflin. $19.95.

Carolyn See`s fourth novel, about an affluent Los Angeles family, has the makings of a satire about California life circa 1990. However, it doesn`t come off, because the story is awkwardly forced to fill a tragic mold.

Jerry Bridges is a senior partner in an investment firm ``with interest all over the Pacific.`` Fortyish, rich, decent, driven and profoundly detached from his family, he nevertheless considers himself happily married to his second wife, Wynn, a proud father to his children, Josh and Tina, aged six and three, and a fond stepfather to Whitney, Wynn`s 17-year-old daughter from her first marriage.

He is unaware of how emotionally remote he in fact is.

While Jerry is a child of privilege, Wynn comes from a working-class background. Married to a hippie minister, a mother at 19, she ``sank to the dead, dank, rented bottom of the San Fernando Valley.`` She separated from her hypocritical husband and escaped her poverty by snagging Jerry and rising from the depths of the Valley to the cliffs of exclusive Pacific Palisades, where she lives in a beautiful house overlooking the ocean, with a live-in housekeeper.

The tragedies that interrupt this privileged, regulated existence arrive in the form of two fatal car accidents. The first, which occurs in the beginning of the novel, kills Whitney`s boyfriend Robin and injures Whitney. However, because the accident brings the estranged Wynn and Whitney closer together, it`s presented as a blessing in disguise. Since we don`t ever know Robin in the flesh, it`s hard to feel sympathy for him.

In the aftermath of her daughter`s injury, Wynn seems to be reaching a reconciliation between her nostalgia for her `60s and `70s, which she nevertheless despised at the time, and which she always refers to as ``dark,`` and her present affluence, where she seems to lack for nothing but her husband`s company. Her dilemma is presented satirically, as are Jerry`s business trips to Tokyo, Indonesia, and New Guinea for his firm, and Whitney`s experiences as an employee for a temp agency called Temporary Success.

The second car accident, caused by a divorcee deranged by the prospect of her ex`s remarriage, which kills off Whitney, Josh, and baby Jonathan (Whitney`s best friend Tracie`s half-brother), derails the satire and subverts the story. The event comes across as a gratuitous imposition of authorial will, whose intention is to supply an instant injection of emotional depth. The mixture is a queasy one.

The inclusion in the novel of Thea, the English fortuneteller who guesses people`s secrets, is curious, because her connection to the Bridges is so tenuous. Whitney`s dead boyfriend Robin`s narrations from beyond the grave are not only fey, but downright silly.

See seems to want to suggest a millenial apocalypse and to imply global connections. However, a couple of car accidents do not an apocalypse make, even though they result in fatalities. Nor do scenes in scattered locations around the Pacific Rim necessarily come together to create a global perspective, not even with the help of a fortuneteller with second sight or the irrepressible spirit of a dead boy.